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This is a powerful call, especially the final email. Why the hesitation? The Fathers have always been on one mind in this area.

+Basil the Great teaches: "As for all those who pretend to confess the sound Orthodox Faith, but are in communion with people who hold a different opinion, if they are forewarned and still remain stubborn, you must not only not be in communion with them, but you must not even call them brothers"

Canon XV of the First-Second Council of Constantinople declared: "But as for those who...sever themselves from communion with their president, that is, because he publicly preaches heresy and with bared head teaches it in the Church, such persons are not only not subject to canonical penalty..., but are worthy of due honor among the Orthodox. For not bishops, but false bishops and false teachers have they condemned, and they have not fragmented the Church's unity with schism, but from schisms and divisions have they earnestly sought to deliver the Church."

And from the Seventh Ecumenical Council: "He that saith not ‘Anathema’ to those in heresy, let him be anathema!"

Are these men really bishops within the Apostolic Succession? The Roman Church says no; Orthodoxy seems to temporize, at least it did 80 years ago. But today? Who knows. I recently spoke with an Orthodox hierarch about the problems in ECUSA. He said it saddened him to see the goings on but wasn't surprised. Outrageous heresies had been tolerated for so long in ECUSA that he had come to the conclusion, personally, that there were either no true bishops in 1st world Anglicanism, or at a minimum very, very few. So far as he was concerned, he was having nothing to do with them, which is quite a change for him as he had had a rather traditional Orthodox American attitude towards Anglicanism in years past. I hesitate to attribute any emotion to him, but his description of Griswold and some of the others ("all dressed up in their episcopal finery preaching sin while standing before the 'Christa'") and his scathing comments on those who claimed to be orthodox Anglicans but maintained communion with these men shouted out utter contempt.

This is a powerful call, especially the final email. Why the hesitation? The Fathers have always been on one mind in this area.

I understand, but in a situation of gradual changes the big problem is when to make the decison to take the action from which you cannot step back. Take a look at an historical case here::

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. ...

Now in my mind the "one great shocking occasion" would quite obviously have been GC2003, or at least GVR's "consecration," but I was a couple decades gone from ECUSA by then.

We had a visitor at church today who some 15 years ago wrote the bishop of the local ECUSA diocese and told him why she could no longer be an Episcopalian. I don't know exactly what prompted her to take action, but it certainly did. (I think she will be back; unlike most of us who have committed Mass to memory she was following in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, but she was following through its little turns and jumps that sadly befuddle the first-timer. A quarter-century flashback for me -- I could see she had known this service. Another diasporate Anglican will be coming home, I think...)

ECUSA bishops such as +Schofield are becoming harder for me to understand.